Klein College’s more than 20,000 alumni are intrepid scholars at top universities; on-air anchors at local and national stations; top executives in organizations like NBC News and Universal Music Group; writers at national newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post; and winners of international communication and media awards, including seven Pulitzer Prizes.

Advertising

Danica Jones ’10
Danica Jones works in account service at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon. A worldwide agency, Wieden + Kennedy is renowned for its groundbreaking work for clients including Nike, Old Spice, Verizon and many, many other brands.

Pete Jones ’92
Pete Jones is senior vice president and group creative director of McCann-Erickson, New York—the world’s largest advertising agency network. He has created and produced multiple, fully integrated campaigns for many of the agency’s U.S. and international clients, including Coca-Cola, Major League Baseball, MasterCard, Nikon and Verizon. He has written dozens of commercials for MasterCard’s well-known “Priceless” campaign.

Jones has been awarded and recognized in the industry by Archive, Adweek Best of The Decade, Cannes Advertising Festival, Creativity Awards, Grand Effies, Midas Awards for Financial Advertising, NY Ad Club and NY Art Director’s Club. Jones is also a member of the Advertising Education Federation and speaks on college campuses, including Temple, to help aspiring advertising professionals enter the field.

Candace Jordan ’11

Candace Jordan has been working at Google for more than three years. Since her graduation from the Klein College of Media and Communication, she has worked at several firms: as an intern at Initiative New York City, a global media strategy firm; then as an integrated media planner at Foote, Cone & Belding; and currently as an account strategist for Google AdWords.

Journalism

Harvey Pollack ’43
Harvey Pollack was the only person who remained active in the NBA from its inception in 1946 until his death in 2015. His life with the NBA started when he served as assistant public relations director of the Philadelphia Warriors and was promoted to director in 1952. Pollack is credited with creating many of the statistical categories now integral to professional basketball, like blocked shots, minutes played, rebounds, steals and turnovers.

He also worked in publishing, for Associated Press, International News Service, ThePhiladelphia Evening Bulletin, TV Guide, United Press International and newspapers across the country.

The Warriors moved to San Francisco in 1962, but Pollack remained in Philadelphia, where he worked for the NBA in various capacities until the 76ers were formed in 1963. He worked part-time in public relations for the 76ers until joining them full-time in 1980. And in 1987, he became director of basketball statistics.

Pollack is the only statistician in any basketball-related Hall of Fame, including the Big Five, Temple Athletic, Jewish, American Legion and others.

Steve Capus ’86
Steve Capus is executive producer of CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and executive editor of CBS News. In his role as executive editor of CBS News, Capus’s multiplatform expertise—as well as decades of newsgathering and production experience—provides a key resource to the entire news division.

His numerous honors include four Emmy Awards, six Edward R. Murrow Awards, one Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and six National Headliner Awards. He previously served as senior vice president of NBC News and executive producer of NBC Nightly News. He was the executive producer for much of NBC News’ coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the war in Iraq and the “Decision 2002–2004” political coverage. In addition, Capus was honored with a Lew Klein Award in 2002. Read more Klein College news about Capus.

Tamron Hall ’92
Tamron Hall is an MSNBC anchor and host of NewsNation with Tamron Hall; she also hosts the third hour of Today. Before joining MSNBC in July 2007, Hall spent 10 years at WFLD in Chicago, where she held a number of positions including consumer reporter, general assignment reporter and host of Fox News in the Morning. Hall was nominated for an Emmy for her consumer segment called “The Bottom Line,” which launched in 1999. Before joining WFLD, Hall spent four years as a general assignment reporter at KTVT in Dallas. She began her broadcasting career at KBTX in Bryan, Texas, as a general assignment reporter. At Temple, Hall is a trustee and has served as the 2008 Dorothy Kirsch lecturer and the 2014 Klein College Winter Commencement speaker. Read more about Hall’s career in Temple magazine.

David Wood ’70
A journalist since 1970, David Wood is national security correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. He has also served as a staff correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, the Los AngelesTimes, Newhouse News Service and Time magazine. He covers combat operations, foreign affairs and military issues, and is a 2012 Pulitzer Prize–winner for national reporting. For four years, he covered guerrilla wars and conflict in Africa as the Nairobi bureau chief for Time. A Washington-based correspondent since 1980, Wood has covered conflict in Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe and the Middle East.

In addition, Wood has won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Defense Reporting and other national awards. He has appeared on BBC World Service radio, CNN, CSPAN and PBSNewsHour, and has lectured at both the U.S. Army Eisenhower Fellows conference and the Joint Forces Staff College. In 1992–1993, he spent a year with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, including three months of ground operations in Somalia. His account of that experience, A Sense of Values, was published by Andrews & McMeel in 1994.

Joby Warrick ’82
Joby Warrick is a Washington Post reporter and a multiple Pulitzer Prize–winner. In 1996 he won the prize for public service for a five-part series on hog-waste pollution in North Carolina. He began reporting on national security and the Middle East after 9/11 and won a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (Knopf-Doubleday 2015). Warrick is also the author of The Triple Agent:The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA (Random House, 2011).

Karen Smith ’10
From her desk in Atlanta, Karen Smith covers the globe. She’s one of CNN’s international desk assignment editors and a gatekeeper of the stories that shape the world. In addition to ensuring stories come to fruition, Smith is also charged with the care of the correspondents, working with them to get live shots on the air and securing their safety.

Smith entered Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication aspiring to become an international journalist. When an opportunity to network with a Temple graduate who worked at CNN at an alumni event in Atlanta, Smith jumped on it. That initial conversation led to an internship at CNN, which in turn led to her full-time job.

Anna Goldfarb ’08
Author and blogger Anna Goldfarb points to her computer-assisted reporting class as the start of it all: It was there that she learned the basics of blogging. And without that knowledge, there wouldn’t be Shmitten Kitten, her popular dating blog read by thousands of fans each day. When she reached 1 million total hits, she stopped paying attention to the figures and realized she had earned internet success.

Jad Sleiman ’14
One week after graduating from the Klein College of Media and Communication, Jad Sleiman was in the heart of the Syrian warzone for three days. And the week after that, The Washington Times ran his story on Harakat Hazm, a new conglomerate of two dozen rebel groups. Read more Klein College news about Sleiman.

Ali Watkins ’14
As an intern with McClatchy DC in 2013 and 2014, Ali Watkins helped break a national story that detailed an apparent feud between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over a congressional report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Now she’s a national security correspondent at BuzzFeed World. Read more about Watkins in Temple magazine.

Jim Kristie ’76
Jim Kristie is the editor and associate publisher of Director & Boards, which focuses on corporate governance for thought leaders. He has been the publication’s editor since 1981 and its associate publisher since 1991. During his tenure, he has served as coordinating editor of Corporate Restructuring: A Guide to Creating the Premium-Valued Company, published in 1989 by McGraw-Hill Book Co. Kristie is an adjunct instructor in Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, where he teaches Advanced Public Relations Writing. Kristie appears frequently before governance conferences and meetings and is regularly quoted in the major media and specialized publications as an authoritative source on leadership issues.

Media Studies and Production

Steve Baskerville ’72
Steve Baskerville has been CBS2’s meteorologist since 1987. Before moving to Chicago, he hosted a children’s show filmed in Philadelphia that aired in several major markets across the country, a handful of specials geared toward teenagers and segments for AM/PM, a daytime show in Philadelphia hosted by Maury Povich.

Maureen Clark ’81
Before moving to Anchorage, Alaska, Maureen Clark was a writer for CBS News, including CBS Evening News and CBS Morning News. And when she felt the pull to leave the Lower 48 for Anchorage, she followed her gut. While in Alaska, Clark has worked for Alaska Public Radio Network, the Associated Press, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Now she is a public affairs specialist at the Bureau of Land Management.

Andy Horrow ’89
Andy Horrow is chief marketing officer of Wholesome Tea, but it’s not the first beverage he’s marketed. A few years after graduating from the Klein College of Media and Communication, Horrow went to work at Porter Novelli, a public relations agency in Chicago. There he worked intimately with some sports industry accounts, including Gatorade.

From Gatorade, Horrow joined PepsiCo, where he worked as the flavor portfolio global marketing director responsible for the international growth of 7UP and Mountain Dew. He was promoted to chief marketing director of PepsiCo’s Tropicana brand and led the Trop-50 launch. He joined Mike’s Hard Lemonade in 2011, where he oversaw the company’s growth plans via advertising, brand strategy and innovation until he joined Wholesome Tea.

Sheri Lynch ’85
Every day from 6 to 10 a.m., Sheri Lynch’s voice resonates across the country: She’s the award-winning co-host of the Bob & SheriShow, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and nationally syndicated on more than 40 other stations. Lynch is also the author of Be Happy Or I’ll Scream!My Deranged Quest for the Perfect Husband, Family and Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2006) and Hello, My Name is Mommy (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004).

Mark Pokedoff ’84
Mark Pokedoff was among approximately 2,300 NBC broadcasters who descended on Sochi’s Olympic Village in 2014. It was his fifth Olympic Games in a row, and he handled the opening and closing ceremonies and the hockey broadcasts for the NBC Universal family of networks: CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, nbcolympics.com, NBCSN and USA. As a freelance EVS operator (who receives video from cameras covering the event and quickly assembles highlights, montages and replays), Pokedoff has worked almost every major sporting event from the Super Bowl to Wimbledon for networks including CBS, Comcast Sports Group, ESPN, NBC and The Golf Channel.

Kevin Negandhi ’98
Before he landed his current position as host of ESPN SportsCenter, Kevin Negandhi got his broadcasting career off to a running start by completing five internships while at Temple. And after graduation, he left the fourth largest media market of Philadelphia to become an anchor and a reporter in Kirksville, Missouri. Later on in his career, he was sports director of WWSB/ABC 7 in Sarasota, Florida, when in 2007 he auditioned for and won his place behind the SportsCenter desk. Negandhi was also Temple University’s 2015 Commencement speaker. Read more about Negandhi’s career in Temple magazine.

Larry Rosen ’84
Larry Rosen is vice president of broadcasting for the Baltimore Ravens. He is also responsible for five TV shows per week—one of which he hosts—that air on Comcast SportsNet during football season. Rosen also covered sports as executive director at PRISM in Philadelphia from 1983 to 1999. He joined the Ravens in 2000—just in time to earn a Super Bowl ring.

Andrew Orth ’85
Photographer Andrew Orth has spent afternoons with the likes of Cheech Marin, the Rolling Stones, and the director of The Wrestler and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky.

After graduation, Orth accepted a position as a video editor at Chiat Day, the ad agency responsible for Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” commercial. But he quickly discovered that the work didn’t suit him: He spent the majority of his time in a small editing room and didn’t have much time to tend to his true passion—photography.

So when a friend contacted him with an opportunity to shoot the fashion scene in Milan, Orth couldn’t turn it down. In only a few years, he became known as one of the scene’s top photographers.

Orth soon moved into celebrity and Hollywood photography; his first big break was a shoot with Mike Newell, director of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Donnie Brasco, for Venice magazine. Orth was soon in demand. Exhibits of his work, Engaging Hollywood and Directing Hollywood—the latter for which Orth turned the camera on some of Hollywood’s top directors—were shown at the Reading Public Museum in 2007 and 2011 respectively.

Jeff Skversky ’01
A die-hard Philadelphia sports fan, Jeff Skversky fulfilled a dream when he first appeared on Action News—a job for which he felt he was born. A 6ABC sportscaster since 2009, Skversky arrived there well-versed in the history of the Phillies and the Eagles and ready to enter the living rooms of sports fans across the Delaware Valley.

While still at Temple, Skversky interned at Comcast SportsNet and 6ABC. And though his first job fell through soon after he moved south to Macon, Georgia, for it, Skversky bounced back with work at the NBC station in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After working in Syracuse, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri, and doing freelance work for Fox29 in Philadelphia and for stations in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Skversky was hired at Channel 6.